Scientific Experts Flunk Nearly All GOP Prez Candidates On Climate Change

It just doesn't get any better than this: At the request of the Associated Press, eight climate and biological scientists (university professors) graded the top dozen presidential candidates on what they have said regarding climate change-global warming.  That includes: in debates, tweets and in interviews, e.g. on radio or TV. (Source: The Denver Post, 'GOP Hopefuls Not Even Warm', NOv. 23, p. 11A)

To eliminate the possibility of bias all the candidates' comments were stripped of identity, names and instead given randomly generated numbers so none of the professors would know who exactly made each comment that they were grading. All of the scientists were selected by professional scientific societies as being the most capable of assessing the level of fact, fiction or distortion in any given statement.

The end results were noting short of amazing, well, okay - assuming you didn't know that the Reepos are the anti-science party.  A summary of the findings, grades follows:

- Hillary Clinton had the highest score at 94.

- Martin O'Malley scored 91, although three of the professors didn't assign grades, saying his statements were more about policy.

- Bernie Sanders scored an 87, and according to press releases was "dinged for exaggeration" when he said global warming "could make the Earth uninhabitable"

But let's be fair here. Technically, global warming itself would not make the planet uninhabitable, BUT - if global warming accelerated to the runaway greenhouse effect, it absolutely would render Earth uninhabitable.  See, e.g.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/venus/greenhouse.html


Moving on:

- Jeb Bush was the only Republican candidate to "almost" pass at 64. (Though in the end the profs agreed to given him a passing grade, I guess because they couldn't bear to see all the Reeptards fail)

- Gov. Chris Christie scored 54, though like O'Malley, two profs deferred grading because they believed his statements were more about policy than science.  (Which suggests to me that the realms of policy and science can often overlap)

- John Kasich scored 47

- Rand Paul scored 38

- Carly Fiorina scored 28

- Marco Rubio scored 21

- Donald Trump scored 15

- Ben Carson score 13

- Ted Cruz scored 6. (All eight professors put Cruz at the bottom of the class)


Some example comments and reactions:

Rubio confronted the issue in a Sept. 16 debate, arguing that:

"China is now the top greenhouse gas emitter and the U.S. can do little to change the future climate"

But one prof from Macalester College (Louisa Bradtmiller) responded that the fact the U.S. still spews out 17 percent of the world's CO2 shows "big cuts would still make a difference"

To Rubio's claim that China isn't doing much, Prof. Andrew Dressler - a climate scientist at Texas A & M called "nonsense" and is "out of date".

Cruz earned bad grades for telling an interviewer:

"If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years there's been zero global warming. That satellites say it ain't happening".

But Florida State's James Elsner called bollocks and noted ground data show every decade has been warmer than the last since middle of the 20th century and that satellite-based observations "show continued warming over the past several decades"

Climate scientist Michael Mann observed, when the comment for Cruz' random numbered comment came up:

"This individual understands less about science and climate change than the average kindergartner."

In fact, federal ground-based data (which scientists aver is more reliable than satellites) show 15 of the 17 years since 1997 have been warmer than 1997, and 2015 is on track to top 2014 as the warmest ever year on record. So much for the nonsense of a "global warming pause".

Meanwhile, "the Donna" (as in prima donna) - in a September radio interview, said:

"It could be warming but it's going to start to cool at some point. And you know in the 1920s people talked about global cooling".

But as I pointed out in several previous posts,  while the global cooling zeitgeist originated in the 1920s it was  picked up again in the mid to late 1970s. It was soon left in the scientific dustbin, after it was discovered a decade or so later, that it had been incepted by particulates and aerosols in the atmosphere.  After the Clean Air Act and similar bills were passed overseas (e.g. in the UK), those particulates disappeared and the cooling was no longer evident. (Aerosols remained and gave way to the global dimming phenomenon which also concealed the worst of global warming - but when aerosols were also controlled - after similar legislation, global dimming also receded and warming assumed dominance.)

Harvard's James McCarthy - a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)  called Trump's comments "nonsense". Emmanuel Vincent, a climate scientist at the Univ. of California-Merced said:

"The candidate does not appear to have any commitment to accuracy"

The general assessment of all the Reepo candidates who failed?

Roughly the level of advanced kindergartners or first graders. Totally unfit to govern a nation faced with perhaps the greatest crisis in human history.

Bret Stephens - Conservo Climate Skeptic - Gets 'Spanked' on 'REAL TIME'

Conservo author and WSJ columnist-nitwit, Bret Stephens, was throttled so comprehensively on Bill Maher's 'Real Time' last night, it was almost like seeing a whelp eaten by wolves. From income inequality, to taxes, to the Obama State of the Union and the environment, this turkey displayed being lost at sea as Howard Dean then Maher took turns skewering his foolishness.

There isn't the space or time to deal with everything so I will just focus on Stephens' evident idiocy to do with global warming and climate science. In the opening part of the segment Maher noted the recent  NY Times headlines (in the past 5 days)  to the effect that  'Ocean life faces mass extinction'    whereupon Stephens butted in,  saying:  "But also from 1975". As Maher pressed him, he babbled "and in 1935 and onwards".

 Maher pressed him some more, asking:  'So you're saying the oceans are not dying?':

And the twit twittered:

"I am saying we've been hearing predictions of imminent environmental destruction for a very long time."

Bill then put him on the spot, asking: "So you're saying there was a prediction in the New York Times from 1935 that 'ocean life faces extinction'?"

Whereupon Stephens replies:

"What I'm saying is if you look at a Newsweek from 1975 you will see it"

And  Maher moaned, 'Oh no, not the cooling thing!'

To which Stephens responded: "Yes, the cooling thing!"

For those who may not know, global cooling was once all the rage--  briefly! Some popular  'zines picked it up in the mid to late 70s but it was soon left in the scientific dustbin. This was after it was discovered a decade or so later, that it had been incepted by particulates and aerosols in the atmosphere.  After the Clean Air Act and similar bills were passed overseas (e.g. in the UK), those particulates disappeared and the cooling was no longer evident. (Aerosols remained and gave way to the global dimming phenomenon which also concealed the worst of global warming - but when aerosols were also controlled - after similar legislation, global dimming also receded and warming assumed dominance.)

So what Stephens ought to have read was the more recent Newsweek piece on the global warming disinformation industry (Aug. 13, 2007, ‘The Truth About Denial’, p. 21) noting the corporate media has been especially guilty in its misplaced notions of objectivity and fairness since they:

“qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with ‘some scientists believe’ when the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-induced greenhouse emissions are contributing to warming”.

Maher then noted 2014 as the hottest year ever and hence asked whether the talking point that warming has halted since 1998 "shouldn't die" - since 1998 was an El Nino year so was an aberration. To which Stephens replied:

"No because it was the hottest year ever by a hundredth of a degree so what the people are pointing out is we've had the same high temperatures for the past fifteen years."

Which is bollocks. First, because the temperature actually rose as a global mean by 1.24F not  "one hundredth of a degree"

Also the deniers never claimed the past 15 years were all high temperature years, they claimed warming had ceased from 1998, which is not the same thing.  The fact that 14 of the past 15 years have all been progressively  hotter puts the kibosh on this flatulence. See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/george-will-no-warming-for-last-16.html

When Maher cited work detailing 10,855 peer-reviewed climate papers of which only two rejected the notion of man-made climate change-  2 out of 10,855 - and asked: 'Doesn't that persuade you?' and adding "Don't you think scientists know more about science then we do?', Stephens blurted:

"What doesn't persuade me is that scientists ought to know more about public policy  than we do and ought to dictate what public policy is."

He then cited the example of Bjorn Lomborg "bringing together some of the greatest scientists alive" and  Lomborg had asked them: "What are your priorities?" Stephens testily claimed this lot agreed that the "least amount of resources should be devoted to climate change."

Maher laughed and joked that: "Maybe these were different scientists from the 10,855 I mentioned". He also admitted he was not familiar with "the study"  - but let's provide some contextual  background, in particular first noting it was not a "study" but a contrarian climate convocation and also these were not scientists but economists. According to Wikipedia:

"In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, a project-based conference where prominent economists sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methods based on the theory of welfare economics.   Lomborg campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argued for adaptation to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and for spending money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition. In his critique of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Lomborg stated: "Global warming is by no means our main environmental threat"


In April, 2008, a fellow Mensan - Marty Nemko - also brought this up in a Mensa Bulletin piece and asked:

Why did the Copenhagen Consensus, a group of 36 experts including four Nobel Prize winners, conclude that, among 17 challenges facing the world, efforts to stop global warming should receive the lowest priority?

To which I replied in an April 10, 2008 blog post:

"The Copenhagen Consensus – organized by longtime skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, and composed entirely of economists- would naturally have rated global warming lowest in its priorities for challenges facing the world. They are not climate scientists, after all! They’ll be vastly more concerned with economic blowback!"

I also showed how these dopes were only able to pursue their economics by discounting the resources of the natural world as irrelevant "externalities". For more on this and economics' other failures as a real science, see:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-economics-science.html

In the end, the fact that Stephens confuses scientists with economists in the "Copenhagen Consensus"  discloses he's not even remotely qualified to be involved in any climate change-global warming discussion. Hell, he wasn't even aware that global dimming (google!) was responsible for the aberration of cooling in the 70s and the fact that "theory" has long since bit the dust.

But maybe if "Bozo the Clown" ever returns there will be a place for Stephens there! Especially when he claimed at the end of the relevant segment that Galileo was engendering a paradigmatic revolt with  his "heliocentric theory" - "given the consensus of science at the time held the geocentric as true". But Maher had to correct him again noting that Galileo was on the side of real science (known since the time of Copernicus) and was actually inveighing against the religious orthodoxy of the time. (The Pope at the time, Paul V, actually confided to Galileo that he supported the heliocentric theory but was unable to do so because the geocentric view was dogma. Get it? Dogma - i.e. religious belief).

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/27/wsj_columnist_failed_snow_predictions_mean_we_must_be_wrong_about_climate_change_too/

And:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maher-rips-gop-on-climate-what-do-you-have-against-listening-to-scientists/

Even the Planetary Society has Climate Change Flat Earthers

Incredibly,  on reading the most recent issue of the Planetary Society's Planetary Report (Sept-Oct., p. 18, 'Members' Dialogue') I was astounded to come across two letters that took the organization to task for its "biased treatment of the global warming issue".  This was after their reading the July-August, 2008 special issue. Of course, even then the issue was relatively settled but now even more so - thanks to high resolution satellite imagery of the poles, as well as more detailed ice core analyses. Thus, the complaint that "a growing number of papers don't support global warming" is plain bullocks. In fact, just the converse is true.

One knuckle-dragger, a Warren Miller, wrote:

"Without going into great detail,  interglacial periods are directly correlated to a number of natural phenomena, including Sun cycles, Earth axis variation, orbital procession variation, and yes, CO2 levels. These processes combine to cause an end to ice ages usually once every 100,000 years. Most of the causal culprits are never mentioned by the global warming camp."


Well, they're never mentioned because they're not really relevant. While Miller is gracious enough to note the effects of CO2- CO2 levels, he doesn't go the next step and report that there never has been a glacial period or ice age when the CO2 level is at 200ppm or higher (see, e.g. Gale Christianson's book, Greenhouse).   In effect, the 'Sun cycles' (solar sunspot cycles) would not have played any role in halting an ice age for when CO2 levels were < 200ppm.  The same applies to 'Earth axis variation', 'orbital procession variation' (i.e. change in eccentricity of orbit) which are to do with the controversial Milankovitch hypothesis, which I've already exposed as half-baked schlock in a previous post, e.g. 'The Travails of the Milankovitch Hypothesis', Dec. 5, 2007)

Miller also drags in the red herring of "global cooling" being a prevalent belief in the 1970s, failing to note that the reason was to do with an effect only appreciated years later called global dimming  - by which aerosols and other pollutants in the atmosphere artificially kept down the ambient temperatures by 40 percent or more. Once 'clean air' laws were passed, as in the USA and Britain, the pollutants contributing to the cooling were reduced to the point global warming predominated.

Miller then adds:

"If you wish to continue publishing global warming articles, please do so in an unbiased fashion, befitting the long history of the Planetary Society. Better yet, stick with the topics that have led to your loyal readership."

Ah yes! Don't veer too far off the path of the 'Middle Mind' - into areas some factions of our country can't handle and never will - because it means economic growth must be retracted. And oh, by the way, steer clear of anthropogenic based warming or you will piss guys like Miller off. To which I'd tell Bill Nye, lead CEO of the Society, let that ilk go and even allow the door to smack them in the butt on the way out. We don't need or want them. In fact, their very presence gives a bad name to the Society.

Not to be outdone, we spot the reply of another genius, Phil Pickering, who moans:

"It is going to continue to warm up no matter what is done. Learn to live with it. Just do not continue to scare our young people with unproven scientific facts that make mankind there evil culprit."

Right! So, in other words, our young people are too infantile to handle the truth - that we are steering this planet toward an incendiary disaster - and we need to coddle them and feed them fairy stories that we're not the ones responsible. So just go on burning all that fossil fuel - whether in auto engines, or in coal fired plants and be happy!


What both these characters need to see is the MSNBC documentary, 'The Last Days of Planet Earth': where physicist Michiko Kaku observes:  "For the first time in history, humans have the potential to alter the destiny of a whole planet."

On the same documentary astrophysicist Neil Degresse Tyson put it another way:

"Imagine the irony of our species having the intellect to stop an asteroid impact, but lacking the intellect to moderate the worst effects of global warming. It boggles the mind!"

Indeed, because it's inexcusable! Further, I go so far as one British climatologist who opined in the same documentary that so-called "climate mavericks" and their skeptic pals who are holding back bold changes, are no different from Holocaust deniers. (Who in a number of countries, such as Austria and Germany can be jailed for making public pronouncements).

Is this an incursion of liberty or "free speech"? Well another question: If a fire breaks out in a crowded theater and several 'maverick' voices yell 'There is no fire, stay put!' and all the people perish, what is their accountability (hint: they sneak out after yelling the injunction to stay put)? Should they not face lengthy prison terms? The same situation applies to the global warming deniers whose defective PR has postponed necessary, timely action, which will make the difference between a moderately-warmed, tolerable planet and an intolerable one in the maw of the runaway greenhouse effect.

In this light, I recall after the failure of the climate conference in Durban to accomplish anything significant or durable,  The Economist (December 17, 2011 p. 138) sounded off:

"Its terms - even assuming they are acted upon - are unlikely to prevent a global temperature rise of of more than 2 C, which was the stated aim of the whole UN climate 'process'. Indeed, they might easily allow a 4C rise"

The latter would be catastrophic and on top of the existing (hitherto) 1.2 C increase, bring us to the precipice of the runaway greenhouse. Carl Sagan noted in an interview (with Ted Turner) ca. 1989 (still have it on tape) that the limits for catastrophic climate change- we're talking species exterminating magnitude with a runaway greenhouse - are not as high as many think. In fact, he cited the tolerance increment of six degrees Celsius.

This position was reinforced in Sagan's essay: 'Ambush - the Warming of the World', p. 98, in his last popular book, Billions and Billions, Random House, 1997.

Is this all "scare mongering"? That is what the flat Earth, Denier cultists want you to believe, so they can wreck the world on the basis of pure economics with no thought of the morrow or how our children and grand children will forever curse us for putting our comforts and stock profits over their welfare.

In a blog four years ago, I warned about the impending signs of ice sheet breakup and melting in Greenland in connection with the phenomenon known as "Jokulhlaup" (cf. ‘Jokulhlaup Observed in Greenland ice sheet’, appearing in Eos: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (Vol. 89, No. 35, 26 Aug. 2008, p. 221). The cited paper specifically noted an increased frequency in occurrence of “jokalhlaups”or sudden glacial bursts of melting runoff from glaciers. It was this phenomena that also played a role in the “unusual cracks" that set off the separation of a “chunk of ice the size of Manhattan” (19 sq. miles)from Ellesmere Island in Canada’s northern Arctic.

Since then, many more drastic break-ups of glaciers have been observed and documented and now readers can access this material directly at the following link:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1108763899

Anyone watching this documented evidence who isn't terrified, has lost most of his or her brain neurons.

We also know that this process provides one of the nonlinear drivers toward catastrophic climate change. Melting of ice caps and glaciers (already occurring) results in diminished albedo (fraction of solar radiation reflected back into space), a darker Earth surface - with more infrared radiation (e.g. HEAT) being absorbed - reinforcing and enhancing global warming. As more ice melts from the polar regions, the positive feedback from lowering albedo proceeds faster. The overall (mean) ocean temperatures continue to rise - ultimately becoming too hot for any marine life- and reaching equilibrium temperature somewhere in the next 500 years. All ocean currents, circulation systems will, of course, eventually cease. With atmospheric circulation soon following (as on Venus) , all solar energy going into heating the oceans until their specific heat capacity is reached. We then will have vaporization.

Even now, before the runaway has set in, we know the acidity of sea water has increased nearly 30% since the Industrial Revolution. Given that sea life, including corals, fish, and the critical phyto-plankton (which provide most of our planet's oxygen) can only exist within very narrow pH levels this may be most disturbing. It means that there is the potential for humanity to suffer devastating famines and loss of life long before the Runaway Greenhouse charges up.

The upshot of all this is that deniers and their BS can no longer be tolerated, given the havoc already afoot from the delays they have promoted. And rather than give the likes of Warren Miller and Phil Pickering a forum to spout off the Planetary Society would do better to ignore them. Their voices represent only a small and irascible minority, and let's bear in mind that in science - unlike in a democracy - truth isn't settled by votes (even if they are few and far between) but by facts and hard evidence.